One of the centerpiece projects in the massive IT infrastructure upgrade of the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) is not only running behind schedule but also risks losing the support of doctors and other health workers due to a lack of engagement with the medical profession, the public spending watchdog for the U.K. government warned in a report published Wednesday.
According to the report by the U.K. National Audit Office (NAO), an online appointment booking system called Choose and Book was scheduled to make 205,000 bookings by the end of December, but only 63 live electronic bookings were made. Rather than reaching its target of 100 per cent availability by the end of 2005, the government agency said it now expects only 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the NHS will have access to the system by then.
Choose and Book, commissioned by the Department of Health’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT), is designed to allow patients to make hospital appointments online from a choice of locations. Atos Origin SA was contracted in 2003 to deliver a functioning system and Cerner Corp., of Kansas City, Missouri, is providing the software. Problems have included the reluctance of users to work with an unreliable end-to-end system, limited progress in linking to GP (general practitioner) and hospital systems and the limited number of GPs willing to use the system.U.K. National Audit Office (NAO)>Text
The first e-booking was made in July 2004 but only 63 e-bookings were recorded by year’s end, according to the NAO report. “Problems have included the reluctance of users to work with an unreliable end-to-end system, limited progress in linking to GP (general practitioner) and hospital systems and the limited number of GPs willing to use the system,” the NAO said.
The British Medical Association (BMA), a professional association for doctors, said much work needs to be done by the Department of Health and, in particular, by the NPfIT before GPs are convinced that the IT initiative will be successful. GPs feel they are working in an information desert and need much more detail and experience of what is involved with Choose and Book, the BMA said. Additionally, many GPs are still not completely satisfied that the system will protect patient confidentiality, and they will not have confidence in the new system until this is properly addressed, the BMA said.
U.K. Health Secretary John Reid said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) on Wednesday that the Choose and Book system was weeks, not months or years, behind its targets and that the progress of the project was not as “dramatically bad as it sounds.” Officials from the Department of Health also said that more than 2,500 GPs have already been involved in developing systems to support the government’s aims and that the department will seek to increase engagement with GPs during the year.
According to the NAO’s survey of 1,500 GPs, around half of these know very little about the IT system and 61 per cent feel either very negative or a little negative about the Choose and Book system. “GPs’ concerns include practice capacity, workload, consultation length and fears that existing health inequalities will be exacerbated,” the NAO report said. “The Department has deliberately held back its main effort to inform and engage GPs about choice until it has had a working e-booking system to show GPs, but it intends to mount a campaign to inform and engage GPs during 2005.”
When queried Wednesday, health workers in a local doctor’s office in Brixton, south London, for example, had not even heard of the project and complained of being hampered by old and inadequate office computers as well as drawers full of paper files.
The chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Edward Leigh, who is also a Conservative Member of Parliament, called the progress towards delivering the IT system “abysmal” and accused the government of failing to provide value for taxpayers’ money. With only 63 e-bookings having been carried out, “the average cost so far (of Choose and Book) has been
